Well-Known Member

Spartrekus - sorry but I was joking about a PhD: I have a strange sense of humor and what I meant was that fvwm seems so complicated to configure, I would need a PhD to do it

It's really not THAT bad, just a lot of options to look through.

I do not use Windows for anything other than digitally signing PDFs for my work. I sometimes have to do that and Adobe Acrobat is the only software I have seen that does this. I have a cheap Windows laptop I use for this purpose. All other tasks I do on FreeBSD.

Active Member

My X61 running FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE-p10. It serves as my .mp3 player and is never online so I leave well enough alone. It sits next to my recliner with headphones plugged in so I usually don't bother to turn the music off when I take off the headphones. The next time I pick them up the music is already playing.

It's from the Rob Zombie film Lords of Salem and that's his wife Sheri. It may not seem very Christmas-like to you, but I was thinking of my ex who shares the same name and does to me...

Wow! How did you get that mixer/equaliser in xine Trihexagonal? I use audacious in OpenBSD for its equaliser/visualisations. Did at one time try xine, but found the controls too small for my liking (despite trying a range of skins), but seeing your skin/setup I'm tempted to revisit xine

Member

I only partially agree with this statement. In this window manager, maximum functionality and maximum beauty (obviously a matter of taste) can be achieved by using minimal computer resources. For example, in Debian i made this. When the system starts, it occupies 120 megabytes of RAM.

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I am using WindowMaker on FreeBSD 11.2 at the moment. I've used fvwm 5 years befors; both WMs are very nice and customizable. This is a 2x17" monitor setup with a ThinkPad X230 - not bleeding edge but it works like a charm.

Aspiring Daemon

I only partially agree with this statement. In this window manager, maximum functionality and maximum beauty (obviously a matter of taste) can be achieved by using minimal computer resources. For example, in Debian i made this. When the system starts, it occupies 120 megabytes of RAM.

Member

So this year I 'discovered' FreeBSD. Trying to use it as a desktop and music server. For the DE's tried Gnome, Xfce4, Window Maker, FVWM and KDE4/5. At the moment having the best experience with 11.2 and KDE4 because I can install everything with pkg, Kodi not conflicting with Dolphin and using qmpdclient instead of Cantata. Unfortunately my Brother AIO is not supported and bash script doesn't work. Happy New Year and celebrating KDE4's last day in the ports ;-). I know it's bloated but it runs smoothly now.

Well-Known Member

Actually, I was surprised (on Linux), how light Plasma/KDE5 was. Yes, it's dependency heavy, but resource wise, it was under 1 gig (600+meg) at first logon. That whole premise is largely crap since memory is so cheap but some people fixate on it for whatever reason. I guess it matters if you are running an SBC or something with very limited memory and no expansion capability.

Funny, but since switching to FreeBSD, I have gone completely minimal and really enjoy it! I went from openSUSE + KDE5/Plasma to FreeBSD 11.2 --> 12.0 with x11-wm/cwm and I am very happy. I do find myself using some QT5 tools though, mainly because I really like them (editors/texstudio), for example.

Well-Known Member

Agree: on the Gnome side, "tracker" was a horrific mess and caused a big performance hit. I always disabled it the few times I used Gnome 3 and never missed any functionality. I did not have the same experience with baloo (?) on KDE 5 - not sure what it was for but I didn't notice any performance hit. I did always disable searches in both DE's, mainly because I found them pointless.

Aspiring Daemon

Actually, I was surprised (on Linux), how light Plasma/KDE5 was. Yes, it's dependency heavy, but resource wise, it was under 1 gig (600+meg) at first logon. That whole premise is largely crap since memory is so cheap but some people fixate on it for whatever reason. I guess it matters if you are running an SBC or something with very limited memory and no expansion capability.

Funny, but since switching to FreeBSD, I have gone completely minimal and really enjoy it! I went from openSUSE + KDE5/Plasma to FreeBSD 11.2 --> 12.0 with x11-wm/cwm and I am very happy. I do find myself using some QT5 tools though, mainly because I really like them (editors/texstudio), for example.

lxde and xfce are with the time actually closer to kde. Gnome is not that far.
xfce with slim is the smallest one.
WIth my i7-8 KDE runs well (but it gets slow with several windows and the web browser).

Because the libraries are complex and heavy, it is obvious that to optimize looks more complex and not so easy.
Better to buy a SSD harddisk than to look at million lines of code.

Maybe, finally, it could be better to avoid having a desktop because it might take all your memory and cut down performances.

Active Member

Running a stripped down Plasma5 in lieu of KDE 5, with balloo (file search) features turned off, I find CPU usage to be about as low as it is in LXDE, although memory usage is still much higher in Plasma 5. Memory usage decreases slowly but surely if the Plasma 5 desktop is left open but allowed to remain idle. If LXDE is left open but idle, it actually uses less memory and CPU than the sddm login manager does. The same is not true with Plasma 5, but at 1-10% CPU usage, and around 200 MB RAM usage or lower when left idle for an hour or so, it's still acceptable for me for my purposes, even on a low memory system.

Aspiring Daemon

Running a stripped down Plasma5 in lieu of KDE 5, with balloo (file search) features turned off, I find CPU usage to be about as low as it is in LXDE, although memory usage is still much higher in Plasma 5. Memory usage decreases slowly but surely if the Plasma 5 desktop is left open but allowed to remain idle. If LXDE is left open but idle, it actually uses less memory and CPU than the sddm login manager does. The same is not true with Plasma 5, but at 1-10% CPU usage, and around 200 MB RAM usage or lower when left idle for an hour or so, it's still acceptable for me for my purposes, even on a low memory system.